"I live near the Holland Marsh, a market gardening area in the drained flood plain of the Holland River, which is bordered north and south by woody hills. A busy highway bisects the fields, in summer, precision planted with impossibly emerald onions and carrots. Winter in the marsh is just as visually striking- a flat, white, empty gulag. This is the location of the SLEEP FARM paintings, although altered by bad dreams during a period of chronic insomnia. The Sleep Farm in winter is very quiet, cold and dull, watched over by monuments inspired by the colossal bronze Stalins that used to dominate soviet city squares, and cell phone towers that now dominate my rural neighbourhood. The Sleep Farm in summer is invaded by fantastic beings, which are based on some of my small clay, wood or cardboard sculptures."  Luck, January 2002

Living in rural Ontario has altered the dreams and artwork of Christina Luck.  Her immediate landscape has become the setting her 'fantastic beings' inhabit.  The seemingly pastoral Holland Marsh farm buildings and equipment have taken on another life in the recent paintings of York University graduate Christina Luck (BFA 1978).  Her imagination and ability with paint combine to take us into the non-physical world.  Cry Baby, Lightning Bunny, and Monument live out their lives from season to season in The Sleep Farm series, immortalized in the paint on the small wooden panels or larger canvases. 

Naïve, surreal and expressionistic are adjectives that could come to mind when viewing these works.  One could think of Kane, Kreighoff, Kurelek and other earlier Canadian genre painters as well when trying to place Luck's work in the greater artworld.  And one would be on the right track.  However it is important to remember that Luck lives with us in the here and now of southern Ontario and as such is adding to that legacy in her extraordinary new paintings.